Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Evaluations of KwandongBrian by his students

In March, I commented about how a few Korean universities are going to post their Professor evaluations online for the public to view. In that post, I promised to post my evaluations. Dang it all! I'm actually not that proud of them - I have some work to do.

I’m trying to look at these results in stages.I’ve seen the numbers, and sadly, my average is a little below the university’s average for professors.I’m concerned about that.However, the criteria for the numbers is written in Korean.I have the translations but I haven’t analyzed the results yet.

I have also looked at the comments but, again, have not translated them.I can read a few easily, and those are the positive ones: “good class”, “interesting class” and the like.

Now, I'm looking at the translations.

Okay, the criteria:

First, these are beyond my control:

1) The number of students in the class was appropriate.

12) The 15-week lesson plan was kept exactly and it met the initial expectation.

7) The textbook and supportive materials were well selected and used effectively.

The semester averaged about 13 classes, with Tuesdays having the most classes and Mondays and Fridays the least.We foreign teachers don’t learn of the cancelled classes until the week of, quite frequently.

I do choose supporting materials but not the main text.I cannot comment here on the textbooks as a coworker wrote one of them.

These two criteria I need to heed the results:

9) The instructor draws students' participation voluntarily by using various methods.

10) Types of homework and evaluation helped us study.

Not many students volunteer and I usually randomly pick them from the attendance list.

I think I need to improve the homework I give.Due to the uncertain schedule, I know that some classes did not receive much homework (I had 5 assignments ready for 1st year, but had to cancel some so as not to conflict with the exams).

I like these three criteria and hope I scored well:

13) The students' participation in the class was quite high.

14) I am satisfied with the class overall.

15) I'd like to recommend the instructor to other students.

It seems that I cannot format a table without a lot of work -easier to do it in Word, print it and take a picture of it.

First, I suppose I could make excuses for my score with the engineering class.Math Education, and all education classes, are usually very enthusiastic.Police Admin students also work hard.Engineering, less so.Still, that doesn’t mean its my privilege to phone it in.Also, Sports students are usually not that excited about English but I did a good enough job there.No, clearly I need to concentrate on weaker classes and maintain my own level of enthusiasm even when the students normally do not.

The first three factors I felt I had little control over but the scores are similar and acceptable.

I feared #9 and 10 were weak areas and I certainly see a lot of variation there.

Prepare meaningful homework, Kwandongbrian!

The final three categories seem to relate to my comments about enthusiasm.Maybe they rub my nose in the importance of enthusiasm.

Huh, a big difference regarding following the 15 week plan – and yet these three classes had an almost identical number of classes.

# 10

Prepare meaningful homework, Kwandongbrian!

# 14: overall satisfaction.I sometimes wonder if this is a sort of checksum, you know, to see if they really understood the questions. The sports class gave me a higher overall score but than tourism but were less satisfied overall.Huh.

The takeaway for me is to work on better homework: creation, grading and commentary.I have tried to mark the homework in class to avoid carrying it home: this isn’t quite as self-serving as it sounds – if students miss later classes, I end up with a lot of unclaimed homework at the end of the semester.I need to take my time marking and commenting on the homework to make it more useful overall.

Added later: I wrote this last night but waited until today to photograph the tables. I've had time to think. I still plan to, want to and maybe, need to improve the way I treat homework but I know that most students do it in class, in the ten minute break between classes. I frequently receive homework written on an end-paper from the textbook (because the same students that are late with homework don't bring notebooks to class). Copying is rampant although I punish all I am certain of.

The university has an E-paper site where I can publish homework for students to download (saving the school the cost of paper and making the student pay directly). I think I will post homework for a period of three days two days after the class. For a Monday class, students could download the homework Thursday, Friday or Saturday. They might not look at the printout until the day its due but they must think about it beforehand.

I may post my comments about the student comments but I will leave that for now.

2 comments:

I was also thinking about the comments that students posted. Most of them were, "Very nice class", "Interesting", and so on but some caught my eye. For example, "Lack of class preparation and frequent lateness led to a loss of interest." That was from a second year class shared with a Korean co-teacher. I suspect that comments and scores are about both of us because I was never late for class. This is a matter of some concern since contract re-signing is somewhat dependent on our professor evaluations.